


The Richest Ichor of the Heart

by VulnaviaPhibes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 06:37:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14302995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VulnaviaPhibes/pseuds/VulnaviaPhibes
Summary: Aradia’s hands sink into Feferi’s back as if into wax, hot and sticky and luscious, down through her flesh to the muscle, tangle into the interweaving fibers and pluck them like harp strings, as Feferi’s hands sink into her. Their bones interlock like puzzle pieces.





	The Richest Ichor of the Heart

Aradia leads the shivering troll with one hand, letting the other trace the grooves of the time-ravaged bas relief as she descends the stairs. The city was bombed out by imperial dissidents long before she was born, scoured from maps and records, but enough of the dead remember it that here, in the iridescent bubbles of the furthest ring, some fragment of it lives on.  
“There,” she says, as quietly as she can while so very excited, “this is a nicer spot, don’t you think? Do you remember this place?”  
The troll says nothing, runs his fingers compulsively around the base of his horns, looks sharply back at her, at the half-destroyed city, at the mark of the Summoner still hanging on ragged banners from collapsing hivestems.  
“Where… where am I?”  
“That’s a complicated question,” she replies, with the most beneficent smile she can muster, “you could think of it as state beyond consciousness, like a dream.”  
“A dream,” he repeats, unconvinced. He tries to release her hand, to no avail.  
“Some people visit this place, when they dream. Others find their way here as travelers. But some, like you, are guided.”  
There is a chorus of dissonant noise, like an out-of-tune accordion played directly into the ear. Feferi gives the troll a great smack on the shoulder. He screams.  
“You’re dead!” She shouts. He screams again. Aradia gives her a half-annoyed look and a tilt of the head, Feferi grins back, wide as the moon. “Let’s get you tucked away now, alright? Just follow along and stay quiet until you’re taken care of, you’ll be fine!” Before Aradia can object, she gestures regally with one jewel-ringed hand, and long tendrils dripping with rainbow ichor curl from corners out of sight, dragging him off to parts unknown. He screams again, for a half-second, before one of the tendrils wraps around his tongue, and he vanishes.

“I had questions for him you know!” Aradia says, only slightly peeved, “it’s been ages since I met a lowblood familiar with this place. I have suspicions that they used one of the municipal sub-basements as a repository for storing confiscated propaganda material, maybe even whole printing machines!”  
Feferi giggles, lifts her into a swirling embrace that scatters half-remembered dust and leaves her laughing too. “You know you can just ask him afterwards! I’m sure I can track him down for you! They never know anything when they get dropped off, you know that. They’re like frightened little grubs.”  
“Too long here though,” Aradia replies, regaining some composure, “and they start to lose little details like that. Remember when you brought back that goldblood? He couldn’t even remember the layout of his own hive.”  
“We’ll go and see him later then, in a few hours?”  
“Agreed,” Aradia says, and pulls her into a kiss. Ten sweeps, Aradia thinks. And after all this time it can feel like we’ve changed so little. Before SGRUB, before all this, she would have been what? A legionary in an inhibiter, choking on her own blood with a rifle in her hands as some highblood marched over her back? A dissident scrambling in dust, hiding in burned out hives? These things are useless to think about, of course. She knows so, tells herself, breaks the kiss.  
Feferi looks into her eyes, catches her breath. “Are you alright?” She asks, with that tone of voice that means she’s about to propose a mandatory solution.  
“I was thinking about—“  
“Follow me,” Feferi says, urgently. “Tell me as we go.”

And so Aradia does, holding Feferi’s age-darkened hand as they fly through forests, over deserts, between the crumbling aqueducts of dead cities, a whole planet’s worth of history flashing by in an instant. She talks about her dreams, which in dreambubbles by all rights she shouldn’t be having, and how strange it is to grow older outside of time, and the constant nagging horrible fear in the pit of her stomach she can never shake, that anything she can’t remember is already on the verge of vanishing forever, no matter how many times she writes it down, and Feferi turns and embraces her and they both fall from the sky. They lie there for a long time, in one another’s arms among the blooming night-flowers. The sky is dark, the breeze is cool. Feferi holds Aradia’s head to her chest and breathes, and feels Aradia breathe too, her hands wrapped tight around Feferi’s back. “I don’t see you often enough,” she whispers.

The sky is still dark when Aradia removes the floral braid from Feferi’s untamable hair, and it is dark when they finish their dance, spinning all the way into the sky, their translucent wings shimmering in the starlight like stained glass, and it is dark when their mouths are sore from smiling. It always is.  
“Would you like to see what I wanted to show you before?”  
“And what is that?”  
“The Noble Circle,” Feferi replies. “There’s nothing they don’t remember, and they’re always happy to share with their friends. Maybe it could make you feel a little better!”  
“That’s not quite what I meant you know! It’s not a matter of nobody else remembering, it’s more like… Ah, but… alright. I don’t think this is the kind of trip you really get to pass up, huh?”  
“Hahah! I bet I can get you in whenever you want,” Feferi says, lifting Aradia to her feet, “You don’t have to go tonight, if you don’t want to.”  
Aradia grins. “Now that you’ve promised, you’re going to have to take me every day.”  
Feferi laughs a bright, cackling laugh, and fixes her eyes on the stars, and begins.

Ascension to the Circle is syndetic. Feferi’s hands join with Aradia’s, feels the roughness of her carapace. She traces the hairline cracks, feels the grooves of their fingers intersect, brushes gently against the edge of the soft flesh at the base of her thumb. She pulls in, their arms rise up and touch, the gossamer-light fabric of their divine vestments intermingling, flaring in the rough winds that encircle them. Aradia looks into Feferi’s eyes, wet and glossy and enormous, a deep tyrian ocean full of stolen light, her jagged pupil its wave-crest. A shiver rolls down her spine, and she drags Feferi into her embrace, running her hands over the princess’ muscular shoulders, tangling them in her hair. Feferi, having known Aradia for so long as an insubstantial creature: a ghost, a machine, someone from far away, is, as always, struck by her substance, her heat and warmth and life, like the red gooey heart of a speared lusus, still palpitating in her arms. Their lips touch, and their legs, and very briefly their teeth. The winds pick up, tearing ice-cold at their backs, but their heartbeats dance in synchrony, their blood pounds through their veins, warms their flesh as they melt into one another. Aradia’s hands sink into Feferi’s back as if into wax, hot and sticky and luscious, down through her flesh to the muscle, tangle into the interweaving fibers and pluck them like harp strings, as Feferi’s hands sink into her. Their bones interlock like puzzle pieces. They can barely feel the wind now, can barely hear it over the deafening pulse of their hearts. When their tongues melt into one, there is a brief moment of panic. Aradia gasps, breathless, almost pulls away, but Feferi rests her forehead against Aradia’s, locks their lips in an airtight seal, and breathes. At first their breathing is shaky, a staccato stutter-stop of held breaths and half-gasps, but in time, with focus, they modulate, matching the metronome of their heartbeat. Aradia breathes out, Feferi breathes in. Feferi breathes in, Aradia breathes out. Warmth flows between them, and soon it feels natural, sucking the same breath forever, drawing out the oxygen like the flavor from a stick of gum. Soon they can’t feel the cold at all. Their head rings, their vision goes dark. There is a precipitous feeling in their guts, like the edge of falling asleep. And then the fall, like the ground has fallen out from under their feet, and the headache-bright pinpricks of starlight, and the yawning void above, below, beyond. The Furthest Ring.

“The Cathedral has a hundred-thousand tiers,” they say to themselves, “but they let me skip to the Circle whenever I like! It’s very sweet of them, especially when I’ve only got a single guest with me. Well, a very important guest, of course!”  
They grin. “Oh, this must be very difficult for you! I always forget how hard it was for me when I first tried it, I needed a whole mess of Lusii and they essentially held my hand for the last ten-thousand after I got the gnostic taint you know, so it doesn’t reflect poorly on you at all! Here, uh, well, why don’t you start with your name! It’s always good to hold it strong, though be careful not to bring it out when it isn’t needed of course.”  
“I know,” they say to themselves, “I understand the principle. I’ve heard more than a few lifetimes of experience.”  
“Ah, well…”  
“Of course.”  
“…”  
“The gnostic taint is pretty gross, I’m told.”  
“Oh, yes! It undoes all of your development retroactively, it’s horrible! The salt crusts over your memory first, like little white flecks where you need to recall a name or a face or a moment—”  
“You know I’ve heard the crust isn’t even associated with the underlying taint? It’s—”  
“A kind of temporal infection that piggybacks on the irritation!”  
“Exactly! Isn’t that amazing?!”“Oh, absolutely! You know we had to specially ward against it when we made the bubbles! It lives on the surface of the universe like cosmic pond scum, or at least that’s what Morthol said, likes to congregate in godskulls too, so whenever you get carrion feeders coming in they get lousy with crust, and that’s a whole section of Paradox Space that needs refolding—“  
“Wait, Morthol, like… like Morthol Dryax? Really?”  
“You KNOW him?!?!”  
“Hahah! He’s the watchman of the dead, silly! I talk to him every day! Or at least, I’ve started to. To be honest they were a little wary of me at first, wanted me to prove my devotion, sacrifice myself in their honor, show I wouldn’t betray them. After what happened with Lord English and Jack I think they’re still a little nervous about outsiders running around their afterlife breaking things! After a while though, I got a chance to talk to Morthol Dryax. It was kind of weird since he should have been all around the dream bubble borders, but I guess there was some disagreement over death versus dreams versus non-existence—“  
“Oh, yes, there was! He dealt with vanishing ghosts originally! He was not excited about having his portfolio expanded. Between you and me he’s kind of a lazy bones.”  
They giggle for a little while. It’s barely even a joke.

Then, very suddenly, they say “Oh, Aradia!”  
Feferi sighs in relief, and laughs, bright as a brass bell. “`I wasn’t sure if I should remind you! It’s usually not so difficult to forget but I guess we mesh super well!”  
“Better than usual, you mean?” Aradia responds, “I suppose I didn’t expect it to feel so… natural. Do you suppose it’s love? Or only a spiritual or physiological quirk?”  
“I like to think it’s love.”  
“So do I.”  
And the sky bears open on them! the darkness rent from within like the hatching shell of a crocodile egg! revealing a engulfing womb of deepest indigo! in which stir shapes beyond reckoning! a knot of squamous serpentine filaments! flourished with streaks of royal ink!  
“One of Gl’bgolyb’s sisters,” Feferi says, “the rift’s carbuncle.”  
Her voice is strong and clear, but she picks at their carapace with one thumb claw, and Aradia can feel the tension in their shared shoulders. They hold hands, at Aradia’s compulsion, forearm to forearm, squeeze tight. They smile brighter than they believe, than Feferi believes, but it’s a good feeling anyway, like a cool breeze on a humid night. Slowly, gently, they break their grip, extend a hand to the tip of the sister’s beak, a mote of dust against the colossus, and feel the tension rush from their body as it draws them in through the rift, beyond the confines of paradox space to the high seat of the Noble Circle, a place which is no place at all. 

And everything goes dark again, for just a second. But the scrutiny of the Noble Circle is bright. Brighter than thought, brighter than the stars, brighter than Alternia’s hateful sun. Bright as humiliation. And then it ends, and it’s dark, and quiet again. They feel halfway unmade, like junked machines. Which part goes where? Do the joints of their fingers still connect? Their tongue is not in their mouth, their eyes splayed out across uncrossable distances. Something of their union is disjointed. Feferi can feel Aradia’s heartbeat deep in her chest, out of sync with her own. Their hands intermingle, fingers woven into knots both elaborate and contorted. When she kicks her legs to swim forward, she feels Aradia’s lag behind, unsteady, the chafe of her skin, the warmth of her on her back, like a bone-deep embrace. When they address the Circle, Aradia can feel Feferi’s tongue in her mouth, all the way down her throat and out between her teeth, slick and rubbery like grubflesh. Her mouth feels crowded with Feferi’s teeth, longer and sharper than her own. She flicks her own tongue over them experimentally, and feels their mouth fill with blood. Feferi’s tongue coils instinctively around hers, squeezing droplets of hot rust-red blood down their throat, spreading it across their lips with a painterly flick. And yet, with Aradia’s guts squirming in hers and her mouth all crowded with teeth and tongues and the ache of Aradia’s bones scraping against her own, Feferi manages to hold her mind steady. Decades of practice have refined her talent, and ten sweeps without interruption have shined it to untrammeled clarity. When her propitiations are completed, a deep and resonant noise thrums in her ears. Thick strands of ropey iridescent ichor ooze around her head in a suffocating embrace. Her thoughts itch. She is home. 

“One story,” she conveys to Aradia, “for your first visitation. They won’t even ask for a price, since you’re with me! Isn’t that sweet?”  
Aradia’s head is still swimming, even with the clarity of Feferi’s voice to guide her.  
“And… and I…”  
“You get to choose! Anything you want! They’ve never let me down before, I’m sure they’ll have lots to tell about it.”  
“Do you remember that city, the one we… we saw tonight?”  
“Oh, I… yes! Yes of course!” Feferi could hardly recall it. Had it been moments ago, really? It was so difficult to keep track of the time the ascension consumes. It could have been sweeps and sweeps lost in adulation and the opening of locks.  
“Six hours ago,” Aradia clarifies.  
Ah. Right.

“I think,” she says, with a grin that incorporates all of Feferi’s teeth, ”I’d like to know what it would have been like to see it obliterated. That first. I’m in the mood for catharsis.” Her chuckle is not entirely without humor.  
“As you wish,” Feferi intones ceremonially, and she gestures for the Noble Circle to begin. In their skin, Aradia fidgets nervously. Feferi tightens their knotted fingers, reclines comfortably back into her companion. Aradia feels again the reassuring weight of Feferi’s heart on her own. She slowly, carefully, allows her muscles to relax, the tension of her mind to dissipate, and lets Feferi engulf her slowly, like the tide. Together and one, they lie back in a peculiar intimacy, as histories of their fallen empire wash over them.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a blind gift exchange.


End file.
